OPINIONWho knew, in the exuberance of 2008, that the American people were actually electing an introvert?
FOR EIGHT seconds, we saw the president we had craved for three years: cool, joyous, funny, connected.
“I, I’m so in love with you,” Barack Obama crooned to a thrilled crowd at a fundraiser at the Apollo in Harlem on Thursday night, doing a seductive imitation as Al Green himself looked on.
The song would make a good campaign anthem: “Let’s stay together, lovin’ you whether, whether times are good or bad, happy or sad.” Don’t break up, turn around and make up.
Times have been bad and sad, and The One did not turn out to be a messiah, just a mortal politician who ruefully jokes that his talent is hitting the “sweet spot” where he makes no one happy, neither allies nor opponents.
The man who became famous with a speech declaring that we were one America, not opposing teams of red and blue states, presides over an America more riven by blue and red than ever.
The man who came to Washington on a wave of euphoria has had a presidency with all the joy of a root canal, dragged down by W’s recklessness and his own inability to read America’s panic and its thirst for a strong leader. In an interview with Fareed Zakaria for this week’s Time cover story, the president is maddeningly naive. Asked about his cool, aloof style and his unproductive relationship with John Boehner, Obama replied: “You know, the truth is, actually, when it comes to Congress, the issue is not personal relationships. My suspicion is that this whole critique has to do with the fact that I don’t go to a lot of Washington parties. And as a consequence, the Washington press corps maybe just doesn’t feel like I’m in the mix enough with them, and they figure, well, if I’m not spending time with them, I must be cold and aloof. The fact is, I’ve got a 13-year-old and 10-year-old daughter.”
Reagan didn’t socialise with the press. He spent his evenings with Nancy, watching TV with dinner trays. But he knew that to transcend, you can’t condescend.
The portrait of the first couple in Jodi Kantor’s new book, The Obamas, bristles with grievance and the rational president’s disdain for the irrational nature of politics, the press and Republicans. Despite what his rivals say, the president and the first lady do believe in American exceptionalism – their own, and they feel overassaulted and underappreciated.
We disappointed them. As Michelle said to Oprah in an interview she did with the president last May: “I always told the voters, the question isn’t whether Barack Obama is ready to be president. The question is whether we’re ready. And that continues to be the question we have to ask ourselves.”
They still believed, as their friend Valerie Jarrett once said, that Obama was “just too talented to do what ordinary people do”.
As Kantor reports, when the president met Democratic members of Congress who had lost their seats in the midterms because of an incoherent White House economic and jobs strategy, he did not seem to comprehend the anxiety that had spawned the Tea Party, or feel any regret.
Jim Oberstar, who lost his long-held Minnesota perch, recalled Obama’s saying, “In the end, this is for the greater good of the country”.
Who knew, in the exuberance of 2008, that America was electing an introvert? And that one who touched so many felt above the touchy-feely-gritty parts of politics? Asked last week by Piers Morgan how he got on with Obama, Jimmy Carter – one of two living Democratic ex-presidents – replied: “We don’t really have any relationship.” The Clintons have not been courted with dinners in the private residence either.
Kantor writes that the Obamas, feeling misunderstood, burrowed into “self-imposed exile” – a “bubble within the bubble” – with their small circle of Chicago friends, who reinforced the idea that “the American public just did not appreciate their exceptional leader”. She reports that Marty Nesbitt indignantly told his fellow Obama pal Eric Whitaker that the president “could get 70 or 80 per cent of the vote anywhere but the US”. The Obamas, especially Michelle, have radiated the sense that Americans do not appreciate what they sacrifice by living in a gilded cage. They’ve forgotten Rule No 1 of politics: no one sheds tears for anyone lucky enough to live at the White House. And after four or eight years of service, you are assured membership in the 1 per cent club.
The Obamas truly feel like victims. But Newt Gingrich, who campaigns by attacking the culture of victimisation, plays one on stage. He soared at the Charleston CNN debate by brazenly proclaiming himself the victim of “the elite media protecting Barack Obama” (the same Obama who told Time he was victimised by the press).
Newt’s gambit was a calculated way of deflecting attention from a charge by his second wife, Marianne, that the family values he preaches are hypocritical platitudes, given his cheating ways with two wives he divorced when they were ill.
Could 2012, remarkably, be a race between two powerful victims yearning to be lonely at the top?
